Jeffrey K Lazo

	Jeff at the Great Wall near Beijing, China. He traveled to China as an invited speaker at Beijing Meteorological Bureau to assist their development of socioeconomic assessments of their weather services (23-30 September 2006).

During FY2006, Dr. Lazo continued managing the Societal Impacts Program (SIP), which focuses on research, community support, and outreach and education to enhance the use of social sciences in the weather enterprise.

Conferences, Workshops, and Community Support

Jeff, working with others from NCAR, nationally, and internationally, organized a workshop, with the financial assistance of the National Science Foundation to develop an proposed agenda for the North American THORPEX societal and economic research and applications (NAT SERA) effort. The workshop website is through the SIP website at www.sip.ucar.edu.

Jeff also worked with Eve Grunfest and Julie Demuth to facilitate the Weather and Society * Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) workshops. WAS*IS aims to better integrate weather and social science to empower practitioners, researchers, and stakeholders, in all sectors of the weather enterprise, to forge new relationships and to use new tools for more effective socio-economic applications and evaluations of weather products.

The SIP continues to develop a range of information resources including the website (www.sip.ucar.edu), a Societal Aspects web page, the Extreme Weather Sourcebook, the weather and society (WxSoc) internet based newsgroup, a Societal Impacts newsletter, and the Digital Library of Societal Impacts (DLSI).

Jeff is the chair of the THORPEX Societal and Economic Research and Applications working group and is a member of the WMO Task Force on Socio-Economic Applications of Meteorological and Hydrological Services.

Research Activities

Dr. Lazo, working with Pete Larsen of the University of Alaska, Don Waldman of the University of Colorado, and Megan Harrod of Stratus Consulting in Boulder, Colorado, continuing research on the sensitivity of the US economic sectors to weather variability. Working with Barbara Brown and Rebecca Morss of NCAR, Jeff continued efforts with researchers at Stratus Consulting to undertake a national study of households' values for current and improved weather forecasts. And, with Rebecca Morss and Julie Demuth (NCAR), he is currently developing a survey to investigate how to improve communication of weather forecast uncertainty.

Funding Sources

The research and these activities are supported by the National Science Foundation through its support of RAL and the SERE Lab, as well as funding from the US Weather Research Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.